Zomato to launch marketplace for food solutions

This marketplace will be part of Zomato's upcoming cloud-based point of sale system, Zomato Base, which will launch in November.BENGALURU: Online restaurant guide and food ordering service Zomato is creating a marketplace for restaurant owners that will allow them to buy products like cutlery, help with licences, choose vendors and decide among various restaurant-related solutions among others. This marketplace will be part of Zomato's upcoming cloud-based point of sale system, Zomato Base, which will launch in November.

Zomato had previously acquired restaurant POS company MaplePOS in April and rebranded it as Zomato Base.

In an interaction with ETtech, Zomato COO Surobhi Das termed Base as a platform with “absolutely everything you need to run a restaurant”. Zomato's other solution like table reservation and online ordering will also be integrated into this product.

"All you need to do as a merchant is know where you are opening your restaurant and know what kind of restaurants you want to open. Everything else, Base will help you decide," she said. Zomato is piloting this product at select restaurants and will be one of its biggest focus areas in the future. "The idea is eventually to have one platform for every interaction between the merchant and the user in the dining journey," she added.

Zomato's other major focus is replicating its product suite across all the 22 countries where it is currently operational.

It recently extended its food ordering service to Dubai and plans to shortly roll it out in other delivery heavy markets like Melbourne, the Philippines and Indonesia. In addition, the company is piloting its table reservation product Zomato Book with 50 select merchants and plans to roll it up on a bigger scale in a month or so.

NEW SPAM CONTROL FEATURES

Zomato is also introducing a new ‘Name and shame' feature for restaurants who have been found guilty of obtaining reviews through unethical practices, wherein it will start displaying a yellow badge alerting consumers to exercise discretion while browsing reviews. This badge will remain on the restaurant page for 30 days. Expressing unhappiness over this move, several restaurant owners asked Zomato to provide a similar platform to highlight unethical users who have posted reviews for malicious purposes. They also sought more control over managing reviews, more particularly negatives ones, that are published on Zomato, to protect their business.

"There have been instances where people have come and threatened us to give discounts or else face negative reviews," a restaurant owner told Zomato executives at a recently -conducted restaurant summit, to which executives said they are looking to address this issue, while pointing out that its a more complex issue to control spam from users as compared to restaurants.

“A divorce could reshape the global wealth ranking. If the couple split their fortune equally, it could leave wife MacKenzie with $69 billion, making her world’s richest woman. It could also make Microsoft's Bill Gates the planet’s richest person once again,” reported Bloomberg. Amazon founder Bezos was dating Lauren Sanchez, a 49-year-old ex-news anchor.